Goodbye to 'The New Yorker'

Under the editorship of David Remnick, politics has come to the fore of the magazine.

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As an avid reader and subscriber to the iconic New Yorker magazine for over 50
years, I am sad to be allowing my subscription to expire. But I am. Here’s
why.

Since its founding in 1925, The New Yorker has been a cultural,
literary landmark, not a partisan political screed. However, under the
editorship of David Remnick (1998-present), politics has come to the fore. In
fact, the first thing one sees on opening the magazine is the famed “Talk of the
Town” section. Previously, one could settle in for a delightful, quirky take on
some random subject by literary giants such as Joseph Mitchell,
E.B. White, Ian Frazier, John McPhee and Lillian Ross.

Today, one
is greeted by the harsh, uncivil rants of the likes of Hendrick Hertzberg
(according to Harvard Magazine, Hertzberg, a former New Republic editor and
Jimmy Carter speech writer, is the “urbane voice of liberalism”).

A
typical Hertzberg “Talk” piece from June 6, 2011, referred to Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu as “Netanyahoo” and called him a “mendacious
mouse.”

At other times, one runs into one Elizabeth Kolbert (former New
York Times Albany bureau chief), whose latest “Talk” column on April 2 begins
with “Mitt Romney, who, it now seems, is going to become the Republican nominee
whether anybody likes it or not....”

It is not so much the substance of
these pieces that offends. It’s the highly predictable, and not particularly
insightful, nature of these comments that makes one question why one is spending
precious time reading these shallow missives. If one wants to subscribe to a
ideologically correct partisan political magazine, there are always the New
Republic, The Nation, or The Weekly Standard, among others, to choose
from.

Meanwhile, as Remnick makes more room for his brand of politics, he
is less liberal in his allowance for other, more traditional New Yorker cultural
fare, such as architecture. Paul Goldberger, the renowned architecture critic of
The New Yorker for the past 15 years, recently decamped for Vanity Fair, in part
because it was getting increasingly difficult to get his ground-breaking
reporting into the Magazine (says Goldberger: “David has... mixed feelings about
the architecture column”).

Also, under Remnick’s reign, The New Yorker,
and particularly Remnick himself, repeatedly and obsessively focuses on what
Remnick perceives to be the failings of the State of Israel, as he did once
again in a recent Talk of the Town “Comment” in the March 12 issue (now posted
prominently on the website of “Intifada – The Voice of Palestine”).

In
this latest diatribe, Remnick crosses the line of rationality, putting Israel in
the same category of countries “embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming” as
Egypt and Syria, decrying “emboldened fundamentalists” (in Israel) who “flaunt
an increasingly aggressive medievalism,” and speaking of a “descent into
apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.”

Why Remnick chooses singularly to
obsess about the Israel-Palestinian conflict (with an unabashedly anti- Israel
bias), while rarely, if ever, commenting on other conflicts where millions of
people also were displaced in war (in Kashmir or Armenia, for example), remains
a mystery. In his March 12 piece, Remnick chooses to highlight a recent incident
where an Orthodox rabbi reportedly spat upon a young schoolgirl because he
considered her attire to be “insufficiently demure.”

Of course, this is
not acceptable behavior.

But why does Remnick devote valuable New Yorker
real estate to such trivial matters, while ignoring much more grievous
violations of human rights elsewhere (the death penalty for gays in Saudi Arabia
and Yemen and other Arab countries, the complete subjugation of women under
Islamic law, including routine violence against women)? One can only surmise
that Remnick is working out his own conflicted identity issues (Remnick was born
of Jewish parents in Hackensack, New Jersey) on the company dime.

While
these issues with The New Yorker might be neatly categorized and dismissed as
those of a certain demographic the magazine is no longer interested in, it will
be harder to dismiss this final objection. Under Remnick’s reign, the always
interesting New Yorker has become, well, just boring. Although Tina Brown was
often rightly criticized during her tenure as editor of The New Yorker, at
least, during her time, the magazine had “buzz” and was “must” reading because
the articles would be the subject of “water cooler” conversations the day after
each issue appeared.

These days, subscribers’ weekly issues pile up on
their bedside tables for months at a time, until they get around to leafing
through an issue for the occasional interesting piece and glancing at the
cartoons. Recent issues have featured such odd and dated pieces as “Albert
Camus’s battles,” “The Return of Van Halen,” “The Food Renaissance in Baja,”
“The Rise of the post 9/11 Canine unit,” and “Dentists without
Borders.”

Not exactly compelling reading.

Remnick receives over
one million dollars in salary per year (plus a limousine and driver), in spite
of the fact that his only previous editorial experience was at his high-school
newspaper. It was at least understandable why Si Newhouse (chairman of Conde
Nast, which publishes The New Yorker) once thought it worthwhile to pay the big
bucks and subsidize a money-losing concern such as the New Yorker for its
“prestige” value. But why does he continue to support it when it has become a
tired, political rag for the anti- Israel crowd? Perhaps Newhouse has his
reasons for doing so. I do not.

The writer is an attorney and writer in
Washington, DC.

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